You can also turn off location on your phone to prevent all apps from accessing your location and potentially save a little battery life, however functions like GPS or weather may not work. You can then select “Google Location History” to manage if your location history gets deleted from Google’s servers, or disable the feature entirely. You can disable this feature by going to Settings > Location.
Google Backup - You may also turn off backup if you do not trust Google with your phone’s information.You may go to Settings > Google > Ads and opt out of personalized ads to prevent this. Ad Tracking - Google keeps track of your interests and location to better serve you ads and news.Hide Notifications - If you don’t want people to be able to see your notifications without unlocking your phone, you can set notifications to be hidden on the lock screen by going to Settings > Sounds & Notifications, and scroll down to “When device is locked”.There are special search engines you can switch to that focus on privacy like DuckDuckGo.
Many popular search engines keep a profile of you based on what you look up, which may help the search engine more easily find the type of information you enjoy but you may not want to trust a company with a detailed account of you. You can manually delete cookies or set the browser to automatically delete them at certain times in your browser’s settings, usually under privacy or security settings.
This can be helpful for keeping certain settings you have on websites or keeping you logged in, but it can take up space on your device and can be used to track you. Some legitimate websites may lack this padlock, in which case you should never enter sensitive information, like passwords or addresses, into those websites.Ĭookies are used by websites to keep track of who you are. You should always make sure that the URL has the padlock icon (like in the image below) or starts with https (the s is important). This is an obvious tip, but always make sure the URL matches the website that you think you are on. You can check out information about antiviruses or removing malware in our Quick Fixes section.